Afghans Bury Victims of U.S. Soldier’s Killing Spree

U.S. soldiers keep watch at the entrance of a military base near Alkozai village following the shooting of Afghan civilians allegedly committed by a rogue U.S. soldier in Panjwayi district, Kandahar province on March 11, 2012. Photographer: Jangir/AFP/Getty Images

March 12 (Bloomberg) -- Villagers in southern Afghanistan
buried 16 men, women and children shot dead in their homes
yesterday by a U.S. soldier, as local authorities urged them not
to attack the nearby American military base in revenge.

Farming families in Zangabad, a grape-growing village 35
kilometers (22 miles) southwest of Kandahar, Afghanistan’s
second-largest city, met in mosques today to hold post-burial
prayers for relatives killed by the soldier, said Habibullah
Khan, whose home was one of those attacked.

“If the U.S. and Afghan governments do not prosecute this
soldier, the Afghan people will protest, and some may attack
that base,” said Agha Lalai Dastgiri, a village elder from the
Alokozay section of Zangabad who serves on the Kandahar
provincial council. The local government has discouraged
villagers from responding with violence, said Khan, 36.

The nighttime killings threaten to renew protests against
U.S. forces and complicate efforts by the Obama administration
to arrange an orderly withdrawal over the next two years.
American troops triggered riots last month by burning copies of
the Koran, the Islamic scripture, in a rubbish pit at the main
U.S. base in the country. In January, Afghans protested over a
video that showed U.S. Marines urinating on the bodies of
Afghans they had killed.

“On top of the Koran burning incident, it’s disastrous,”
and may complicate U.S. efforts to stabilize Afghanistan, Tim
Huxley, executive director at the International Institute for
Strategic Studies in Singapore, said of the killings.

Killed in Bed

Before opening fire, the soldier had to walk about a
kilometer from his base, Khan said in a phone interview.

“The soldier killed four of my family members including my
wife, sisters and a baby nephew,” he said. “I was out of the
district, in the city of Kandahar, but when I came back I saw
blood and all four people had been killed in their beds.”

The attacker gathered 11 of those he killed into one home
and set the bodies on fire, said Lal Mohammed, an elder of
Alokozay who spoke by phone.

After the attack, the soldier returned to his base and
surrendered, said Brigadier General Carsten Jacobson, spokesman
for the NATO-led coalition. President Barack Obama called Afghan
President Hamid Karzai “to express his shock and sadness” and
pledged “to hold fully accountable anyone responsible,”
according to a White House statement.

‘Lone Service Member’

U.S. officials believe the attack was by “a lone service
member” and it was an “isolated incident,” Pentagon spokesman
George Little told reporters today. The soldier was in the
“conventional army” force and was on his first tour of duty in
Afghanistan after three tours in Iraq, he said.

Sayeed Mohammed Akhund, an Afghan lawmaker from Kandahar,
said in a phone interview that legislators wanted the soldier to
be tried in an Afghan court as soon as possible. The country’s
parliament was closed today to commemorate the victims.

The killings may complicate U.S.-Afghan talks on terms by
which some U.S. forces might remain there after 2014, when the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization plans to hand security duties
to the Afghan government, said Ahmad Saeedi, a political analyst
and retired Afghan diplomat in Kabul.

“This will put the Obama administration under new pressure
in Afghanistan and may lead to a faster U.S. withdrawal,”
Saeedi said. “The Afghan people are really in an aggressive
mood now, and we may again see violent protests from them.”

Taliban Stronghold

The attack happened in Panjwai, a plain stretching
southwest from Kandahar city that is densely dotted with
villages whose local mullahs helped found the Taliban movement
in 1994. The district has remained a Taliban stronghold since
NATO’s International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, took
control in heavy fighting in 2006.

The U.S. forces now working in Panjwai typically conduct
joint patrols with the Afghan National Army in the villages
surrounding their bases, seizing homemade bombs, weapons caches
and hashish, according to ISAF news releases over the past seven
months.

The soldier involved in the shootings is from Joint Base
Lewis-McChord, near Tacoma, Washington, said a U.S. official who
spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to
speak publicly. Units from the base’s 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry
Division have taken casualties, notably from bombs planted in
the rural roads of Kandahar province by Taliban active in
Panjwai and nearby districts, according to U.S. Army press
statements.

‘Great Oppression’

Catherine Caruso, a public affairs specialist at the Lewis-McChord base, said she had no information on the identity of the
soldier who committed the attacks. She referred questions to
ISAF.

Karzai said the incident shows “great oppression and
cruelty” toward the people of Afghanistan, according to a
statement from his office. “The people of Afghanistan want full
reports and clarity on the incident’s details from the United
States of America,” he said.

Nine children and three women were among the dead, Karzai
said. Five others were wounded. The Associated Press and the BBC
said the soldier was a staff sergeant.

“What we know is that a U.S. soldier left his forward
operating base in the night hours from Saturday into Sunday,
went into the nearby villages and opened fire on civilians in
those villages,” ISAF spokesman Jacobson said in a video
statement. The serviceman was being questioned, he said.

The suspect is 38 years old and is married with two
children, ABC News said, citing a U.S. official it didn’t name.

Taliban’s Condemnation

“The so-called American peace keepers have once again
quenched their thirst with the blood of innocent Afghan
civilians in Kandahar province,” the Taliban said in a
statement posted on a website used by the insurgents.

Protests over the burning of Korans in a trash dump at the
Bagram air base led to attacks on U.S. personnel in Afghanistan
last month. Two American advisers were shot dead in the Interior
Ministry Feb. 25, while nine Afghans were killed and two
American soldiers wounded in a suicide car-bombing in eastern
Afghanistan Feb. 27.

The shootings in Kandahar are not being linked to “the
incidents that happened recently,” Jacobson said.

Amid the heightened tensions, Chancellor Angela Merkel made
an unannounced visit to German troops based in northern
Afghanistan today. NATO forces will do everything possible to
investigate the “appalling act” near Kandahar, Merkel told
Karzai in a phone call from a German base, according to a
statement issued by the German government.

Holding Responsible

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said in a statement
that he called Karzai and assured him that “we will hold any
perpetrator who is responsible for this violence fully
accountable under the law.”

While Panetta didn’t say so in his statement, the U.S.
retains legal jurisdiction over American troops under a U.S.-
Afghan accord, according to a Jan. 5, 2011 report by the
Congressional Research Service.

Elected officials in the U.S. debated the attack’s
potential impact on already tense U.S.-Afghan relations.

“One incident like this can change the equation,”
Virginia’s Republican Governor Bob McDonnell said on NBC’s
“Meet the Press.” Asked yesterday about U.S. involvement in
Afghanistan, Republican presidential contender Newt Gingrich
said the mission is “not doable” at the current level of U.S.
military forces.